Steam Machine: Valve postpones announcement of price and release date
Valve still cannot name a price for the upcoming Steam Machine. There is also no release date for now – the PC might come later.
Valve's Steam Machine is still a work in progress.
(Image: Valve)
It is a very bad time to launch a gaming PC. In a blog post, Valve explains why there is still no price and no release date for the upcoming Steam Machine and the VR headset Steam Frame: The hardware market is currently too unpredictable.
“When we announced the products in November, we expected to be able to announce concrete prices and launch dates by now,” Valve writes in the blog post. “However, like many other manufacturers in the industry, Valve is also affected by the current global shortages in the availability of memory components. Due to this and the associated rising prices, we have to revise our pricing and market launch plans, especially regarding Steam Machine and Steam Frame.”
Release in the first half of the year
According to the blog post, Valve still plans to launch the devices in the first half of the year. In fact, Valve had previously targeted spring as the release period. Valve is now allowing itself a little more leeway for the market launch of the new hardware. The Steam operator also points out that due to the uncertainties in the hardware market, a further delay in release cannot be ruled out.
Memory prices, which have already risen rapidly in recent months, could worsen again in 2026. Market researchers from Trendforce expect that DDR4 and DDR5 modules intended for PCs could get up to 95 percent pricier in the first quarter of 2026.
The price of the Steam Machine will likely depend significantly on the prices at which Valve can procure memory components and how many parts the company has already secured at potentially lower prices. The price of graphics units is also currently very high – partly because GPUs are in demand for AI data centers.
Price could be high
Valve will therefore have difficulty in pushing the price of the Steam Machine down to a level that is digestible for customers. Community price speculations range from 400 to 1000 euros. Given the high hardware prices, a cost at the lower end of this price range seems difficult to achieve.
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So far, Valve has only stated that the price of the Steam Machine will be based on a PC with comparable components. The GPU of the Steam Machine corresponds to a slightly shrunk Radeon RX 7600 from AMD, which costs around 250 euros. In addition, there is a “semi-custom” Zen 4 chip from AMD with 6 cores and 12 threads and a clock speed of 4.8 GHz, for which the desktop equivalent would cost about 150 to 200 euros. Valve intends to install 16 GB of DDR5 RAM, which currently costs around 200 euros for end customers. In addition, there are costs for the SSD, the case, and manufacturing.
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